After months of searching for a new project car I found a 2004 330i ZHP sedan with just a tad over 100k miles. I found the vehicle at a BMW dealer in Texas from a local trade-in for a 2-series coupe. After quickly making a deal with the selling dealer the car was on a hauler destined for my home address. Within a few weeks of ownership I had a long to-do list of projects with one of them being a speaker update. I reviewed a few different off the shelf options and finally decided on assembling my own parts.

To gather the parts required I relied on parts express who sells a variety of speaker parts. I am very pleased with the results as the hi’s have a new-found vividness where the worn out OEM Harmon Kardon equipment could no longer reproduce.

Here are the list of parts I put together for my speaker replacements.

1. Starting with the front door remove the door card. There are numerous instructions online to remove the door cars and even some speaker companies have a detailed PDF for removal.

2. Install the 5.25 speaker into the SABW525 adapter to install on the front door. To create the connection for the OEM wiring I removed the connector from the OEM speaker and soldered it to the new speaker as seen in the pictures. The OEM screws were not long enough so I replaced them with 1/2 inch – 8/32 Philips head screws.

3. To install the mid-range in the front door I modified the circular housing by removing the raised vertical bar. This allowed me to push the circular speaker into place. Be careful not to break the lip of the housing, these are fragile. I placed the lip over the side of the table as seen in the picture. I also used the OEM connector by removing it from the stock speaker and soldering it to the new 2″ speaker.

4. Finally installing the tweeter was a bit different since the OEM speaker is integrated into a bracket so I was creative. I used the styrofoam padding as the mounting point for the tweeter and glued points on the rear mount of the tweeter to keep it in place. Instead of using the OEM connection points I cut them off and crimped standard speaker push on terminals.

5. To replace the speakers in the rear door, remove the door card then remove the stock speaker. For this speaker I used the OEM housing by gluing the rim of the speaker to the inside door mount. Once it set for an hour I re-installed it into the door card.

6. Finally to install the speaker in the rear deck you will again need the Scosche SABW525. This time however they need to be modified to fit correctly. I used a saw to remove the extended screw terminals as seen in the pictures. Once done it is easy to install the speaker in the factory location. I cut the OEM connector off the car and crimped on push on terminal connectors.

I will say the install was not very hard once I had all the proper hardware. The problems I ran into were not having the right screw sizes, having to modify the brackets for the rear deck and a few other items I pointed out. I am very happy with the results and hope this will help other enthusiasts save a few dollars by doing a little work instead of forking out for a plug and play setup.

If you are looking for a way of screening inbound robo calls I have a great script for you. Using a quick little app you can require inbound callers to press 1 or any digit in order for the call to ring through to your phone. Otherwise the caller gets hung up on. All the audio recordings I used are standard files included with Asterisk core or extra audio files.

Recently Google updated some of its security settings so the tutorial I created around doing Asterisk Voicemail to Email is broken when a new setting is enabled. Lucky for everyone looking to use a Gmail account I have created this new post to help you.

Hope you find this helpful and it works for you. Please let me know if there are any issues so I can correct my tutorial. I like my visitors to get their questions answered with a single visit, not having to bounce around from website to website trying to solve a problem.

I use Rackspace for most of my cloud servers since their support is second to none. They are always very helpful in getting me answers or even going above and beyond what they technically support. So because of this I often build Asterisk servers up there to test with or even for production use. Here is an easy to follow guide on how to build an Asterisk 11 server using Centos 5 image. You can just copy and paste the commands one by one or add them to a text file and run as a script.

Note: This step by step guide is for 64bit operating systems, if you use a 32bit Centos 5 server it will fail.

Are you trying to figure out how to set up click to call from a webpage using the Asterisk AMI? Well look no further, this is an easy to follow guide on exactly how to do it.

So before we start a couple of things you have to know about my environment. First I am hosting the webpage on the Asterisk server for the click to call so I have Apache installed and running, second I have port 80 open on the Asterisk server firewall so I can allow external requests.

So first thing you need to do is configure your Asterisk manager config file with a username who can originate the call.

So that webpage will respond to url post of http://[ip address]/clickcall/index.php?internalnum=101&outboundnum=4075551234

It will first place a phone call to the extension number, in the example case would be 101. Once extension 101 answers that call it will then place the outbound leg of the call to phone number 4075551234.

I love to hear from my students so today I am posting a survey for you to fill me in on what you want more of. Tell me what you like and what you don’t like, or what you want to see more of. Say whatever you want, I am here to listen to you.

I just created a video of how to install Asterisk 13 on CentOS 7 64bit so anyone can follow along. I take this step by step to make it very easy to install the latest version of Asterisk. See the commands below the video.